California Conservative

Major Ben Connable takes on John Murtha’s and Howard Dean’s assumption that we’re the enemy in Iraq and that we can’t win in Iraq all in one Washington Post op-ed. Let’s get to the meat of Maj. Connable’s essay:

The common wisdom seems to be that Iraq is an unwinnable war and a quagmire and that the only thing left to decide is how quickly we withdraw. Depending on which poll you believe, about 60 percent of Americans think it’s time to pull out of Iraq.
How is it, then, that 64 percent of U.S. military officers think we will succeed if we are allowed to continue our work? Why is there such a dramatic divergence between American public opinion and the upbeat assessment of the men and women doing the fighting? Open optimism, whether or not it is warranted, is a necessary trait in senior officers and officials. Skeptics can be excused for discounting glowing reports on Iraq from the upper echelons of power. But it is not a simple thing to ignore genuine optimism from mid-grade, junior and noncommissioned officers who have spent much of the past three years in Iraq.

Don’t look now but Dean’s and Murtha’s assertions just went up in flames after just a couple of paragraphs. It doesn’t surprise me because Maj. Connable deals in facts gained from a frontline perspective. Rep. Murtha and Gov. Dean are dealing in theories gained from manning their ‘DC Bunker’.

Make no mistake about this: Maj. Connable doesn’t think highly about Murtha’s and Dean’s opinions.

We know the streets, the people and the insurgents far better than any armchair academic or talking head. As military professionals, we are trained to gauge the chances of success and failure, to calculate risk and reward. We have little to gain from our optimism and quite a bit to lose as we leave our families over and over again to face danger and deprivation for an increasingly unpopular cause.

In short, the soldiers that think winning in Iraq is achievable are the experts on what’s going on in the streets because that’s their workplace. They’re not just experts on the goings on in the streets but they’re experts on calculating risks and rewards because their lives depend on it. For windbag politicians to think that they know better without visiting Iraq is the ultimate insult to the soldiers’ firsthand knowledge of the situation.

It is difficult for most Americans to rationalize this optimism in the face of the horrific images and depressing stories that have come to symbolize the war in Iraq. Most of the violent news is true; the death and destruction are very real. But experienced military officers know that the horror stories, however dramatic, do not represent the broader conditions there or the chances for future success.

In addressing the dominant media image, Maj. Connable attempts to put things in perspective. He acknowledges that the “horrific images and depressing stories” are “very real” but that there’s far more going on than violence.

The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.
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It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth. The proponents of the quagmire vision argue that the very presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is the cause of the insurgency and that our withdrawal would give the Iraqis their only true chance for stability. Most military officers and NCOs with ground experience in Iraq know that this vision is patently false.

TRANSLATION (Harsh version): Sen. Kennedy, you’re a blowhard far out of touch with reality. You might have a different perspective if you left your DC and Hyannisport bunkers long enough to visit Iraq.

Rep. Murtha, your rambling on and on and on about us being targets and that our presence is fueling the insurgents’ recruiting efforts and the terrorist attacks isn’t based in fact. Before you repeat that BS (short for Barbara Streisand), you ought to check with the troops on the ground so that you’ll have a fact base to base your opinions on.

As for you, Gov. Dean, you wouldn’t recognize a winning strategy if it bit you in the backside. Your statement that we can’t win in Iraq is insulting to those of us winning the war in Iraq. Don’t bother yourself with the day-to-day operations that are establishing liberty for Iraqis. That’s our job and we do it well. For that matter, it’s insulting to hear you compare Iraq with Vietnam. The only similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is that Democrat pacifists are trying to cause us to lose this war just like they tried to cause defeat in Vietnam.

Let’s close with this paragraph:

Anyone who has spent even a day in the Middle East should know that the Arab street would not thank us for abandoning Iraq. The blame for civil war would fall squarely on our shoulders. It is unlikely that the tentative experiments in democracy we have seen in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere would survive the fallout. There would be no dividend of goodwill from heartbroken intellectuals or emboldened Islamic extremists. American troops might be home in the short run, but the experienced professionals know that in the long run, quitting Iraq would mean more deployments, more desperate battles and more death.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, DNC, Iraq, Military, Pelosi, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.